It's gone, all gone.

On a walk today, my husband and I ran into our former next door neighbor.  After exchanging some pleasantries, she asked me if I had seen the yard of the home where we used to live. I told that I had seen what had been done in the front yard.  She told me that she was talking about the back yard.  Since we were headed up toward 11th Avenue, we walked back to her house and looked at the back yard of our former house.

I spent many hours and quite a bit of money transforming a barren hillside into this:

I don't know how many plants and shrubs I planted on that hillside, or how many times I climbed that hill to weed.   We got a lot of pleasure sitting inside the house or on the patio, looking at the hillside as various plants bloomed.

Well, today that hillside looks like this:

The current owners wanted a larger, flat yard so that their young children could have more play space.  The first two levels of the hillside have been removed.  A concrete retaining wall about 8' high will be installed and those children will end up with a backyard big enough for a swing set and lots of running around room.

I have to say that I'm a little sad to see all the hard work that I did over the three years we lived there dismantled by a back hoe in less than a week.  What makes me even more sad is that I sure would have liked to have had a few of those plantings to spruce up the little yard where we currently live.  But they are gone, along with the yard ornament that you can see in the lower left corner of the top picture.

It's been three years since we moved from that house.  But I've always felt that I left a lot of me behind in the landscaping.  It's all pretty much gone now.